THE PRESS MONDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1988. Mediocrity in schools

Press, 5 December 1988, Page 16

THE PRESS MONDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1988. Mediocrity in schools

Twice in the last few days, people with some special knowledge of education have offered the opinion that mediocrity has become the stamp of New Zealand’s education system. The principal of St Andrew’s College, Dr John Rentoul, who is also a member of the Canterbury University Council, says that the potential of thousands of young people is wasted because of a blind acceptance of socalled equality in education. A Japanese educator, Mr Atsuyuki Urakawa, who has been in Tauranga on a teaching exchange scheme for the last six weeks, says that New Zealand’s basic education system is producing a generation of underachievers who only rarely are extended academically. These are considered opinions. Many will agree with Dr Rentoul’s contention that any suggestion of excellence in education is being screwed down to meet the demands of the lowest common denominator. This is not a challenge to the long-cherished concept of equal opportunity in education, but a justifiable criticism of pandering to mediocrity in the classroom and of what seems to be a considered policy of cutting down the tall poppies. Somewhere along the line, equality of opportunity in education has become confused with uniformity of outcome.

Because it is now considered distasteful to sort out the bright from the not-so-bright, education has become a handicap race in which the able students too often are handicapped to the point of frustration or boredom. Excellence has become a pejorative and education is pitched at the lowest or slowest common denominator. A consequence of diluting the “old-fashioned” notion that ability and cleverness should find

reward in education has been that schools have become less and less places of learning; increasingly they have been transformed into workshops of egalitarian social engineering. The Picot reforms, which seek to localise control of schools and of the style of education they will provide, risk increasing the capture of the education system by groups bent on social manipulation. Education long seems to have been in the grip of people with anti-competitive beliefs. Educators who view competition with distaste, and teachers who pretend that the competitive element of striving for excellence is damaging to young egos, purport to prepare their pupils for an increasingly competitive world. Thus, an education system that tries to disguise — and is trying to abolish — failure at school, is prepared nevertheless to launch children into a world where a significant proportion of them will, transparently, fail at the first hurdle: getting a job.

It is a hard and aggressive world. Pretending otherwise is cheating our children. A lot is made these days of the plight of young people who, never having held a job from the time they left school, have not acquired work habits and what used to be called the work ethic. A lot is also made of the lack of enthusiasm or ambition of some young people to find ways out of the dole queues. On both counts the rot might have started in the schools. Too few of today’s pupils are required to strive or are encouraged to stretch for an excellence that not all will attain. Putting forward less than the best they can offer is one of the unhappy lessons the education system teaches pupils today.